Plant collectors

Author Fran Leibowitz once described herself as being so lazy she wished her cigarettes came lit. Well I wish my plants came planted.

The homeless, the discarded, the coveted and the costly, these plants line all the flat surfaces in my backyard. Lose your concentration and you will plant your foot on Miss Wilmot's Ghost (an eryngium), or set your supper down on Mrs. Harry Bickle (a lilac).

The perennials I can push around, but what about the shrubs and trees waiting to be planted?

An email recently arrived from Tom Intven, owner of Canadale Nursery in St. Thomas. "Kathy, your Cornus alternifolia 'Variegata' has been shipped. It is a specimen in a wire basket.

Read: You will need three young men, with no history of hernia trouble to plant it.

Just this weekend I left the house with a light heart and an empty trunk. My mission was to take immediate possession of a new kitten. Turns out the woman with the kittens loved plants even more than felines. I left her place minus the kitten (he needs to mature a bit) but with a trunk full of red trilliums and white bleeding hearts.

Then, innocently I went up to my friend June's garden. She has a superb garden, but is very modest. She knows more about plants than I will ever hope to, I am barely worthy of turning her compost.

My goal was to photograph her Meconopsis, the Himalayan blue poppy. The last time I saw them in bloom was 13 years ago in the garden of the famous David Tomlinson of Aurora.

One must take heroic measures to force them to bloom. The soil must always be moist, it should be acidic, the air around them should be heavy with moisture, they should grow in shade, and never be bothered by nighttime temperatures over 80 degrees. They belong on the east and west coasts. But here they were blooming in June's garden in Hamilton.

She apologized of course, as all gardeners do, "You should have been here last week," she said, "the colour was a much more intense blue."

So she guided me to another plant that was a fresh as a debutante. "Kathy, have you ever grown this? The Allium bulgaricum or Nectaroscordum siculum as it is also called?"

It was a fabulous thing. Imagine a sputnik the colour of tempered chocolate, with splashes of azalea pink. Framed against a blue sky, it looked like it was just shot out of a cannon on Canada Day.

"It's very shibui (Japanese for understated and elegant) don't you think?" Yes I think so...

As she and I hopped with excitement around her garden, I noticed out of the corner of my eye some industrious activity. Her husband, Matthew, was quietly transporting plant material to my car by the wheelbarrow full. He was as efficient and stealthy as an ant taking leaf bits to a nest.

He once described himself as his wife's two-legged mule. On some visits you rarely see more than the top of his head in the perennial border, as he plants and weeds and weeds and plants. He is a man of focus, he once sent me home with a tray full of treasures that sat in my garden for a month or so waiting to be planted. When I did finally start planting them, I found his reading glasses tangled in the foliage.

June did finally admit she had been growing some "things" for me. She took me to her patio, which was so crammed with plants it looked like a minefield.

I looked around at all the weird and wonderful things and thought I had arrived in a parallel solar system - perhaps the new sun-like star 55 Cancri, for I recognized nothing.

Here were plants with leaves that were dotted and dashed, covered in thorns and spines twisted and burnished. Nothing had a cozy name like "Love-in-a-Mist." Instead the Latin names sounded like the end stages of some fatal tropical disease.

I love annuals that climb so she passed along Eccremocarpus scaber the Chilean Glory Flower. This is a very fast growing vine, with little red tubular flowers that look like shiny vitamin capsules. It should erupt up a six-foot plus trellis in no time flat.

Next up Rhodochiton atrosanguineum an annual vine native to Mexico. It has exotic, purple bell-shaped flowers that look heavenly dangling down from a hanging basket. They say you'll never fuss with fuchsia again if you grow this beauty.

In addition to growing beautiful plants, June grows them beautifully. These vines were already thick and vigorous, snaking out of their containers and threatening to strangle each other. Many of them were grown in simple styrofoam cups. So as she scratched their Latin names into the cup surface I said rather longingly, "I'm insane about salvia."

Then the mule-man was summoned from his task of planting 35 lisianthus and directed to dig out a Salvia turkistanica.

Here is a splendid plant with a big, robust profile. The large, pale flowers shoot out from the crinkled foliage like a candelabra. It likes full sun and poor soil. It won't miss a beat in my garden.

"I could have a whole garden full of salvias," I uttered.

"Oh, then you must grow Salvia coccinea, 'Lady in Red'."

And if you want a perfect red and yellow combination, plant these little Calceolarias, it's a new type, the flowers are only as big as the tip of your baby finger."

Rare plants, colour theory, botany lessons are all given generously in June's garden. And if you stay vertical long enough, her husband will bring out the homemade beer. Then you might sample some arugula and sorrel, admire the Japanese iris, and learn how to tell the waxing moon from the waning moon.

Finally you go home with a trunk full of plants, and many pleasant things to ponder.